Re: Darwinian Mechanism of Mutation and Natural Selection Found Lacking


<paratope.epitope@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1176006144.674584.139810@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It is constantly a source of wonder and amazement to me that highly
competent scientists, whom I otherwise hold in high regard, have not
come to these same conclusions. The conclusions are that life could
not have arisen de novo on a barren earth, and that all of the life
forms that we see today could not have appeared as a result of the
darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection.

The evidence for evolution is broken down into three broad
catagories.

The first is direct evidence of small-scale changes in controlled
laboratory experiments.

The second is direct evidence based upon sequences in the fossil
record.

The third is the vestigial argument, the idea that the signs of
history are preserved within every organism which record pathways of
historical descent.

I have never denied for a moment that mutations occur, or that natural
selection occurs. What I'm saying is that it is a trivial effect, with
no creative power to produce new forms. Evolution correctly is defined
as a change in the frequency of genes in a population. The leap of
faith, which I refuse to take, is that these changes can accumulate to
the point where new species, genera and classes are formed. Artificial
selection experiments in laboratories have demonstrated that there is
a point beyond which you cannot go.

I think that a better characterization of those experiments is that there
is a point beyond which you cannot go quickly. That point is reached
when selectable genetic variation in the population is exhausted. We
know that mutation can create more selectable variation, but not usually
within the working lifetime of a laboratory scientist.

Why should it be any different in nature?

It isn't. Natural populations never evolve as fast as in artificially
selected lab experiments.

Let's start at the beginning. Could life have arisen de novo on the
primitive earth? I won't rule it out, but I consider it very unlikely
given what we know. It is becoming more clear as time goes on, that
the primitive atmosphere contained little, if any, ammonia, methane
and hydrogen. This puts all of the experiments of Fox and Miller in
question.

Fox's experiments have been considered a joke by most abiogenesis researchers
for years. The Miller experiment is considered a blind alley by many today.

A much more likely scenario, is that the primitive
atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor.

Yep. But so what? Life probably didn't originate in the atmosphere.

No
one to my knowledge, has proposed any believable mechanism that would
cause these perfectly stable molecules to combine together into RNA,
DNA, proteins, cells, tissues and organisms. You can't even get past
the first step.

Are you familiar with the ideas of Cairns-Smith, Wachtershauser, Ganti,
Morowitz, and other more modern researchers. There are a lot of ideas
out there which don't involve a 'prebiotic soup' of organic molecules.
Did you read the Shapiro article in a recent SciAm? Did you read about
Bada's recent work in which he got amino acids in a Miller-type experiment
with the kind of atmosphere you are talking about just by adding some
iron to the water?

There are lots of ideas out there.

In addition, the oldest cells date back to around 3.45
billion years old.

Some people say so, but doubts have been raised.

The earth probably only became habitable for life
at around 3.8 billion years ago. This leaves you with only 350 million
years for the processes of photosynthesis, replication, cell
respiration and all of the enzymes needed by these processes to
evolve. I just don't think that's enough time.

What makes you so sure that those first fossil cells could do all those
things. There is no evidence that those 'cells' even had DNA and
proteins. That is just an assumption, and, IMO, not a very good assumption.

As to the amount of time, 350 million years is a long time. Look at everything
that happened during the most recent 350 million years.

What do you think happened? It seems much more likely to me that life
came to earth from elsewhere, with all of these processes already in
place. I think the key to it all is the water. The earth appears t o
be the only planet in the solar system with large quantities of water,
which is necessary for life to flourish

I'm sorry. I guess I don't understand you. I think you just said that
life must have originated somewhere besides Earth, because only Earth
has the water that life needs.

That's all well and good, but it only postpones the question.
Where did the space life come from?

Well, now you've come to the question of primary cause. Stated another
way, we may well ask "why is there anything, instead of nothing?" At
some point in time, you've got to get to something that has always
existed. Conventional thinking calls this something God. But it may
just as well be the universe as God, in my mind. We must consider the
possibility that the universe, and the life in it have always existed.
It may just be that the question "why is there life?" is no different
from the question "why is there matter?"

And it may just be that the two questions have nothing in common.

Getting back to evolution, scientists claim that there is a "mountain
of evidence" for evolution.
Do you deny this?

Nope.

Well, I just don't see it.

You have my sympathies.

There is a "mountain of evidence" that all
living forms are related. Of that there can be no doubt. In fact, this
relatedness is profound. I think this is the evidence that they are
talking about. The similarities in genes found across the spectrum of
living things is astounding. The same genes are present in all kinds
of animals, and even in plants. There is a gene in the bean plant that
codes for hemoglobin, which is never used by a bean plant. Why is it
there?

I think you are confused here. There is a gene for leghemoglobin in
beans, and bean plants make good use of it. Leghemoglobin and (animal)
hemoglobin seem to be evolutionarily related, but they are not identical.

But this profound relatedness, does not mean that one organism
is ancestral or descendant to another.

No one claims that any present-day species is ancestral to another
present-day species. The claim is that two present-day species share
common ancestors.

And furthermore, this
relatedness says nothing about the mechanism by which these forms
appeared, certainly it does not support the mechanism of mutation and
natural selection.

Actually, it does. It does so overwhelmingly. You need to look at how
people build phylogenetic trees from genomic sequence data. It is
completely obvious from the data that mutation is the thing that makes
present-day species different from their ancestors. It is a more
subtle argument, but a conclusive one IMO, that selection is also involved.
The argument has to do with haplotypes, genetic linkage, and 'selective
sweeps' and is too technical to go into here. Look it up.

Doesn't the fossil record show that organisms have evolved from simple
forms to complex forms over time? How can you deny this?

Well, it is certainly true that all modern complex forms had some
simple ancestors, if you trace it far enough back. But there are also
several cases in which modern simple forms had more complex ancestors
not too long ago. I suspect we would know of even more such cases if
we were as interested in the modern simple forms.

Even if the fossil record did show this, which it doesn't, this would
say nothing in support of the darwinian mechanism of mutation and
natural selection.

The fact is, the fossil record falsifies the
darwinian mechanism. From the time of the first eukaryotic cells,
around 1.4 billion years ago, up to the Cambrian period which began
around 600 million years ago, life did not progress beyond the single-
cell stage. This is 800 million years available, and no move towards
multicellularity. Then in a period of time which may have been as
short as 5 million years, all of the known animal phyla appear at
once.

Many of them maybe within 5 million years, but a few didn't first appear
until about 30 million years later.

After that, no new animal phyla apppear for the next 500 million
years. This is not consistent with a darwinian view that evolution
occurs by the slow accumulation of beneficial mutations. Another
profound observation is that there appears to have been little or no
evolution in the 40 million years between the Burgess fossils and the
Chengjiang fossils. Why?

Why not? And don't you think that a competing theory has to answer the
same question? What is your explanation, assuming you are characterizing
the evidence correctly?

Aren't there lots of transitional fossils to prove evolution?

There are transitional fossils and there are transitional fossils.
First of all, there is an almost complete absence of transitional
fossils between classes. This is a very important distinction. This
had been known by paleontologists for a long time and Gould and
Eldridge tried to neutralize the problem with their theory of
punctuated equilibrium. There are no intermediate forms between
invertebrates and vertebrates.

Sure there are. You are aware, aren't you, that vertebrates are not
even a phylum.

There are no intermediate forms between
birds and reptiles.

Sure there are. Dinosaurs.

There are no intermediate forms between amphibians
and reptiles, or between fish and amphibians.

I'm noticing a pattern here. Each of your challenges involves a request
for an intermediate between a group and one of its subgroups. Amphibians
are a special kind of fish. Reptiles are a special kind of Amphibian.
Birds are a special kind of reptile (as are mammals). Vertebrates are
a special kind of animal, and 'invertebrate' just means an animal other
than a vertebrate.

So what you are apparently asking for are primitive forms of the special
grouping. Primitive birds, for example. We have them. We have lots of
them, for each of your challenges.

These forms are not
still hidden in the fossil record. They never existed. The hierarchy
of living organisms is profoundly discontinuous. Hardly what we would
expect if life evolved gradually by the slow accumulation of
beneficial mutations.
I've heard it said that humans did not evolve from gorillas, but
rather that gorillas and humans had a "common ancestor". What about
this?

All of these so-called "common ancestors" are hypothetical. Look at
the time lines in any textbook. The lines converge at the base, but
these lines of convergence are usually dotted lines. Why? Because the
convergences to a common ancestor are hypothetical. In my opinion,
they never existed.

They clearly existed. We have fossils of apes that are clearly ancestral
to man, chimp, and gorilla. We just don't have them for the period
immediately before the split. Maybe. There are some candidates, but
they are controversial.

What about this idea of historical evidence. Why does our body display
the vestiges of an arrangement better suited to quadrupedal life, if
we are not descended from four-footed creatures?

lets assume for a moment that we are descended from quadrupeds. What
does that say about mutation and natural selection? Nothing at all. We
may have changed from quadrupeds to bipeds by the addition of a small
chunk of DNA that was incorporated into our genome from a virus that
came from space. This argument only addresses the question of
relatedness, which is clear and profound. It says nothing whatsoever
about the mechanism by which these changes occurred.

As I said before, there is clear evidence that the mechanism is mutation
and natural selection. You seem to be about thirty years behind on your
reading about these subjects.

Nor does the fossil record.

You are right about that. The fossil record does not speak as to mechanism.

The key to the whole question is, "where did the genes
come from?" Where did the instructions that produce these structures
and behaviors originate? I do not believe that they arose by chance as
a result of mutations.

And again, you have my sympathies.

I recently saw an advertisement in a magazine for a car. The caption
said "Mr. Darwin, your car is ready." The implication is that this was
an example of how the car evolved over time into its present state.
Aren't technological advances, such as have occurred in the aircraft
industry examples of evolution?

The analogy between biological evolution by natural selection and
technological advances is a false analogy. I know that some people
have drawn an analogy between biological evolution and the evolution
of, say, an airplane or car. The analogy is false because at no point
in the development of the automobile or airplane was any element of
design achieved by chance. Only by the most strict application of the
rules of engineering and aerodynamics was the final result obtained.
There is no way that a random search could ever have discovered the
design of the internal combustion engine. In all cases, the search for
function is intelligently guided. Evolution by the method you propose
is analagous to problem solving without any intelligent guidance. In
the case of every kind of complex, functional system, the total
magnitude of all combinational possibilities is nearly infinite.
Meaningful islands of function are so rare, that to find even one
would be a miracle.

Sean Pitman is making the same argument here. He hasn't convinced anyone,
though not for lack of trying.

There has been much talk about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Little of it well informed.

You say evolution violates this law. Evolutionists say that this law
only applies to a closed system, and that the earth is not a closed
system, it receives large amounts of energy from the Sun. How do you
answer this?

First of all, there is no such thing as a closed system anywhere in
the universe. The only closed system is the universe itself, as far as
we know. Secondly, the earth radiates back into space an amount of
energy equal to that which it receives from the sun, minus that which
is stored in the process of photosynthesis. The question is, can this
energy from the sun cause molecules of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and
water to aggregate into amino acids and proteins? I don't think so.
The only effect it would have, as far as I can see, is to make the
earth warm. If anything, it would create more disorder by increasing
the average kinetic energy of the molecules. No one to my knowledge,
has proposed a plausible mechanism by which order comes from disorder
under these conditions.

Well, first of all, I notice you are using the word 'closed' for the
situation for which every thermodynamics textbook uses the word 'isolated'.
And you just embarrassed me because I recently said that creationists
almost always get the terminology right. Well, live and learn. ;-)

Prigogine won a Nobel prize for (among other things) extending the 2LOT
to situations far more complicated than isolated and closed systems.
We now know exactly how to apply 2LOT to open systems. Another thing
Prigogine did was to show how, under some circumstances, open systems
can exhibit spontaneous self-organization. Whether this has anything
to do with the origin of life is an open question. But I mention it
because Prigogine's work shows that what you wrote is just wrong.


It seems logical to me that small improvements might accumulate
gradually over time to produce new adaptations. Why don't you see
this?

Who are you talking to here? If this is being posted from a conversation
which took place elsewhere, I wish that you had retained some indication
of the dialog structure!

The biological world is filled with numerous examples of processes and
structures that do not work unless they are complete. Examples would
include the flagellum of a bacterium, the biochemistry of vision, the
blood clotting system, the cilium, the immune system and the cellular
transport system. Many biochemical pathways in the body are "cascade"
reactions in which a series of intermediate steps leads to the final
result. How can these processes and structures be found by natural
selection? They would have no selective value at their intermediate
stages of development. In fact, they might even prove fatal to the
organism. How many random mutations would have to occur before all of
the correct steps are in place? 50% of an eye might not be 50% of
vision, if the missing part was the optic nerve. It would be 0% of
vision.

How do evolutionists view the appearance of new adaptations?

According to evolutionary theory, every adaptive advance discovered
during the course of evolution, along every phylogenetic line has been
found by a gigantic lottery by using a purely random search strategy.
This has been shown by mathematicians to be a hopelessly inefficient
process.

Oh, God! This argument has been advanced and answered so many times that
I am just going to ignore it.

But hasn't Richard Dawkins proposed something called "cumulative
selection" to get around this problem?

There is a fatal flaw in Dawkins example. For cumulative selection to
work, there must be selective advantage at every step in the process
or, the outcome must be known in advance. Otherwise, how can the
"worth" of each small change be judged so that the beneficial
mutations can be kept? We saw previously that many processes and
structures are irreducibly complex so they have no worth at
intermediate steps of evolution. My name has 13 letters and one space.
How long would it take to find it by selecting random combinations of
13 letters and one space? The only way to be successful is if the
target string is known in advance. If the outcome is known in advance,
then we have intelligent design.

You should look at the discussion here involving Sean Pitman. The
mistake he makes, the mistake Behe makes, and the mistake you are making
is to assume that the function of the evolving mechanism is fixed,
and that you need to gradually approach more-and-more perfect implementation
of that fixed function. You (all) are ignoring the possibility that
the intermediate stages in the evolutionary pathway involved different
selectable functions altogether.


Do you think that living organisms show evidence of intelligent
design?
Considering the ingenuity with which living organisms are assembled,
and the deepening layers of complexity that are found therein, I
cannot ascribe it to any random process that is driven by chance. I do
see evidence for intelligent design.

And, yet again, you have my profound sympathies.

If the observational and experimental evidence doesn't support
darwinian evolution, why does it persist as a theory? The main
reason, I think, is that science can offer no alternative. People
expect scientists to have answers. Scientists don't like to say "I
don't know". This would create an information vacuum that would
quickly be filled by religious creationists who believe that God
created the universe and all of the life in it.

Of course, I believe that the evidence does support Darwinian evolution.

But your analysis is interesting if applied to a different question -
abiogenesis. I think that your analysis is pretty good as an explanation
of why the Miller experiment is still mentioned in the textbooks. Most
scientists now know it has nothing to do with how life originated, but
we have nothing to replace it with.

Another reason, is
that there are a whole generation of evolutionary biologists who have
grown up with this theory, believed in it, promoted it and defended
it. How would it be for them, at the twilight of their careers to have
to admit that their life's work was incorrect?

One doesn't often see clergyman retire with an announcement that it was
all a mistake, either.

It is also clear that
Darwinism is on the road to becoming an established religious belief
with Darwin as the diety.

If you had said "with Darwin as the prophet", I might have let that slide.

There are new groups of "ultra-darwinists"
who seek to explain everything in the world including psychology, in
terms of darwinism.

This isn't rocketscience.

No it is not. But you might get some relief from brain surgery.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ORIGIN FUNDAMENTALISTS AVOID VALID IDEAS
    ... Life continued to react to Earth's oxidised environment. ... that would be an extremely unusual type of mutation. ... term for a genetic replication goof. ... May I suggest that you do a little reading on evolution by scientists? ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: ORIGIN FUNDAMENTALISTS AVOID VALID IDEAS
    ... Life continued to react to Earth's oxidised environment. ... that would be an extremely unusual type of mutation. ... term for a genetic replication goof. ... May I suggest that you do a little reading on evolution by scientists? ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Seanpit, ID and complexity
    ... random mutation and I assume natural selection. ... Evolution was accepted in 1859 as a ... happened after it allegedly occurs based on various lines of evidence. ... I would define "random mutation" as the idea that "permanent changes ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Seanpit, ID and complexity
    ... random mutation and I assume natural selection. ... definitions of "evolution." ... evolution within a species. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John
    ... can impart a direction to evolution. ... I don't know why it should be necessary because natural selection is ... I never would claim that mutation is not an important factor in ... People look at nature and they see design, ...
    (talk.origins)
Loading